This article appeared in the October 23, 1998 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
How Our World Was Nearly Destroyed
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
September 23, 1998
During an important mid-1970s private discussion with a famous Israeli diplomat, he cautioned me: "What you say is true; but you are forgetting one thing. There are heads of state who are clinically insane." As examples, he named two then-prominent African heads of state. Today, we can point to such similar examples of politically relevant, dangerous lunacy, as Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu, U.S. Speaker of the House Newton "Yahoo" Gingrich, and U.S. special prosecutor Kenneth Starr. A different charge, of virtual insanity, should be made, in retrospect, against the man who rose to be the one-time, leading political "fixer" for London's Wall Street financier oligarchy, former U.S. High Commissioner for Germany John J. McCloy.[1]
In a sense, McCloy was morally insane. Admittedly, McCloy would not fit the same category of madness as the medieval Flagellants, or such modern Flagellant look-alikes as House Speaker Newt Gingrich's fellow-travellers, "Diamond Pat" Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and "Bibi-the-Butcher" Netanyahu. McCloy was no Elmer Gantry; he was more of the quality of a Babbit than a Bibi. The difference between McCloy and today's crop of right-wing political Yahoos, is that whereas the "Get Clinton" mob mimics the gang of murderous thugs hired to break the miners' strike, McCloy typifies the management which ordered the hiring of the thugs. Disposable Yahoos like Newt Gingrich, usually arrive, like lynch-mobs, in large numbers, so many sheets to a roll; as the reviewer shows, McCloy typifies those who deploy them still today.
Thus, as the reviewer shows, McCloy's madness was of a different cut than such shamelessly obvious loonies as a Netanyahu, Robertson, or Falwell; but, in his own way, he was as mad as Adolf Eichmann, if in his acquired patrician style. McCloy's notable crimes against humanity, were the result of his being gripped by blind obedience to an adopted, Anglophile, anti-U.S., "one worldist" ideology. Once he had adopted that ideology, he was otherwise fully witting of what (and whom) he was doing; but, he was either unwilling, or, like a man trapped within a recurring nightmare, unable to keep himself from doing what the succubus of that madness demanded of him. The bottom line of his autobiography is, that, looking back to the late 1950s and early 1960s, Wall Street lackey McCloy could go down in history, as the "sorcerer's apprentice" who nearly destroyed our world.
The central, but narrower of the topics addressed within this EIR Feature, is the way in which circles including McCloy, in concert with the then-Soviet dictator Nikita Khrushchev, and much of the London and Wall Street establishments, too, collaborated with one another in a wildly utopian, one-worldist project, aimed at eliminating the sovereignty of all nation-states, including that of the U.S.A. The collaboration among the members of this assortment, especially in the lead-up and consummation of the 1962 Cuba Missiles Crisis, is the watershed of every principal catastrophe suffered by the U.S.A., among others, since that nuclear crisis.
On that account, the accompanying book review distills a crucial part of a story long overdue for the telling. It is a very timely story, even as the reviewer tells us; but, even a story with the self-evident importance and shock-impact of this one, must be situated in a larger historical context. To that latter end, EIR has supplied this prologue, and has appended two pieces of documentation respecting two of the most damnable actions by the Churchill regime during the closing twelve months of World War II.
Thus, the book review tells us the kind of evil McCloy represented, the important role he contributed in shaping much of the history of the Twentieth Century; but that only poses a larger question than is addressed within the review itself: What influence within history at large produces the kind of phenomena which McCloy typifies? It is that influence which produced and controlled phenomena such as McCloy, then, now, and long before McCloy was born. McCloy is dead and buried; but that dangerous, evil influence lives on, and is a leading feature of that present, global financial crisis which threatens to bring down civilization. The practical question is, how do we rid future history of that satanic influence?
The key to the biographical account of the case, is McCloy's crucial personal role among those orchestrating that destruction of our civilization and its culture, which has dominated the world since. Without focussing on McCloy's role in those 1960s events to which I have referred earlier, in my report on the case of Lazare Carnot,[2] no truthful account could be given of the influences surrounding the Warren Commission, the repeated attempts to assassinate France's President Charles de Gaulle, and the hurried ouster of Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. The bottom line is: The converging agreement which key figures such as McCloy, Bertrand Russell, Averell Harriman, and Russell's crony Khrushchev represented, together, in orchestrating the 1962 Cuba Missiles Crisis, and in launching that process of so-called "globalization" which is now systematically destroying the U.S. and other economies from within, is indispensable for understanding any important aspect of world history from 1962 to the present day.
Consider the gloomy implications of the presently ongoing disintegration of the world's present financial and monetary systems. We sit now, amid the wreckage of the post-World War II world, the collapsing ruin of what had been considered by the credulous, as the most assuredly durable world-order ever established. Once the relevant facts behind that collapse of civilization are known, it can only be fair to describe McCloy, once again, as I have done here, as "the sorcerer's apprentice who nearly destroyed our world."
The feral instinct of a feudal lackey
There are those conspiracy buffs who delude themselves, by imagining that the notion of "world government" is a Johnny-come-lately idea, some weird plot recently cooked up by some suspected occult circles of modern conspirators. The key to understanding McCloy's role, is that the idea of "world government," or something like it, is the oldest tradition in recorded history.
The key to understanding McCloy's life, is that he became a part of that London-directed Wall Street crowd of financial oligarchs, which hated the sovereign form of the U.S. republic so much, that they were willing to risk setting off a general thermonuclear war to bring the end of U.S. sovereignty about. Like every hater of the sovereign nation-state since Venice of the early Sixteenth Century, McCloy became a devotee of the effort to set the clock of history way, way back, to a time when one-world-style empires ruled the world, and maintained such kinds of "social welfare reforms" as kept the numbers and social condition of the subject poor, down to culled levels which the ruling oligarchy considered agreeable.
Not even a fair approximation of a sovereign nation-state existed on this planet, until the late-Fifteenth-Century reconstruction of shattered feudal France by King Louis XI. It was only as a result of Classical Greek culture's interaction with Christianity, that there came into existence, those ideas which had eventually led western Europe into the Fifteenth-Century Golden Renaissance. The latter Renaissance, in turn, led directly into Louis XI's revolutionary actions, and, later, into the 1789 establishment of the U.S.A. as a Federal constitutional republic. The key to understanding McCloy's one-worldist role in the 1962 Cuba Missiles Crisis and later, is that the opponents of the sovereign nation-state never gave up their heathens' commitment to return the world to some feudal, or quasi-feudal approximation of one-world empire.
To restate the same point in narrower terms of reference: The financial oligarchy whose British-American-Canadian branch McCloy served in his lackey's role, has never given up its intention to eliminate the existence of any sovereign nation-state from this planet, especially the sovereignty of the U.S.A.
For example, in medieval times, the idea of a one-world empire was the goal of the reactionary Welf League, the opponents of the famous Thirteenth-Century, Hohenstaufen nation-builder, Frederick II. During the Sixteenth Century through most of the Eighteenth, maintaining a global financial-oligarchical system, and destroying the sovereign form of nation-state, was the goal of the policies of Venice's financier oligarchy. At the Congress of Vienna, it was the policy of both the British monarchy's financier oligarchy and the landed-aristocratic interest represented by Clement Prince Metternich's Holy Alliance. Within the United States itself, similar anti-nation-state policies have always been the goals of those American Tories centered around the New England opium-traders, London-controlled New York bankers, and the pro-slavery gang associated with the Confederacy.
There is nothing of "mere generality," no mere imitation of Apollo priest Plutarch, in situating McCloy in that historical tradition. As the reviewer points out, the key to McCloy's and Grenville Clark's roles in seeking to establish world government, was to establish a system of "world law." This meant, in their terms, as in the stated intent of Bertrand Russell, to strip nations, including the U.S. itself, of sovereignty, placing nations, including the U.S.A. itself, under the alien military authority of an institution of world government. That notion of "world law" was scarcely new. That notion of "world law" is, as the noted Professor Friedrich von der Heydte's Die Geburtsstunde des souveränen Staates[3] presents the case, the notion of imperial law characteristic of such cases as the ancient empires of Babylon, Rome, and Byzantium; it was the principle of oligarchical, arbitrary law exerted, as law, solely by an imperial authority. One must be very, very wary, these days, whenever some pompous ass rises from his seat to prate unctuously on the subject of the solemnities of a "world of law." This is precisely the tradition of oligarchical law which has been summoned for Kenneth Starr's perverted role in professed neo-Jacobin Gingrich's attempted revolutionary tactic, a parliamentary coup d'état against the Constitution of the U.S.A.
McCloy can be understood only in his acquired role as a leading lackey of plebeian origins, liveried as a Wall Street lawyer and liberal-establishment "fixer." As such a lackey, he served a London-directed, Wall Street financier's oligarchy, the which has been working to destroy the U.S.'s sovereignty and Constitution ever since British agent, and all-around scalawag, Aaron Burr founded the Bank of Manhattan.[4]
To understand McCloy's role in the events leading into and beyond the 1962 Cuba Missiles Crisis, one must not imagine that he was on the same, lower level as self-proclaimed agent of British influence Henry A. Kissinger.[5] Obvious sleazeball Kissinger was brought in, as a subaltern, to the pre-1962 one-worldist, arms-control project being directed by McCloy. Kissinger was assigned to this from London, assigned to work under the New York Council on Foreign Relations' (CFR) George Franklin, and under the patronage of a McCloy liberal-establishment junior, former Stimson assistant McGeorge Bundy. It was through Bundy that the fanatical, Hitler-like racialist, the Henry Kissinger of the 1974 National Security Study Memorandum 200, had earlier obtained a seat under the table in President Kennedy's National Security Council, until, according to reports, Kennedy ordered Bundy to kick the dog out. Kissinger was, like a Newt Gingrich or Kenneth Starr, the expendable type of depraved lout who was used, but never trusted by his masters. To understand the terrible things which have happened to our world during the recent four decades, treat Kissinger as, relatively, merely an unpleasant smell, like the Golem who rampaged while fiction's famous Rabbi of Prague was away. McCloy is the case-study on which to focus.
To understand the roles which London assigned to McCloy, the biographical material on McCloy himself is supplemented by documentation bearing upon Prime Minister Winston Churchill's role in two paradigmatic cases of London's strategic double-dealing during the period of World War II. The first, summarized as part of this EIR Feature, is London's role in prolonging World War II by almost one full year, by keeping Adolf Hitler in power in Germany. The second, is a recently revealed Churchill plot, called "Operation Unthinkable," to use German Wehrmacht divisions as part of an allied assault on the Soviet Union, an assault intended to be launched in June 1945, after Germany would have surrendered to the Anglo-American allies. Remember that McCloy was at the table, when operations of this monstrous type were being dished out, and that McCloy was in that kind of business for the remainder of his active life. Comparing the 1962 missile crisis and its aftermath with two of Churchill's dirty dealings from the World War II period, helps one appreciate how McCloy's masters think, in sending Churchills or McCloys out to do the kinds of deeds they do, down to the present day.
John J. McCloy (center), then U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, with President Harry Truman (left) and Secretary of State Dean Acheson, in the White House, March 1950. McCloy's evil nature as a Wall Street lackey showed through in many ways; for example, his attitude on the interning of Japanese-Americans in 1942: "If it is a question of safety of the country . . . why the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me."
[1] Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy: The Making of the American Establishment (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
[2] Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., "How France's Greatest Military Hero Became a Prussian Lieutenant-General," Executive Intelligence Review, Oct. 2, 1998.
[3] Friedrich August Freiherr von der Heydte, Die Geburtsstunde des souveränen Staates (Regensburg: Druck und Verlag Josef Habbel, 1952).
[4] Anton Chaitkin, Treason in America, 2nd ed. (New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1985). Like special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, Burr was a product of the "fundamentalist" tradition, who used women as sexual assets of his treasonous endeavors. Burr as banker was an asset of the British East India Company interest, Barings Bank, and a protégé of the head of the British foreign service, Jeremy Bentham.
[5] Henry A. Kissinger, "Reflections on a Partnership: British and American Attitudes to Postwar Foreign Policy, Address in Commemoration of the Bicentenary of the Office of Foreign Secretary" (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs [Chatham House], May 10, 1982). The establishment of the British Foreign Office, in 1782, was an offshoot of the brief Prime Ministry of Lord Shelburne. Shelburne's agent, and head of the British foreign intelligence service, was the notorious Jeremy Bentham who deployed such agents as New York banker Aaron Burr and the Jacobin terrorists Danton and Marat.
